Just as George
Romero changed the face of zombie cinema with his groundbreaking
Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Spanish director Amando de Ossorio
gave them a distinctly European neo-gothic makeover in a series of
four films from 1971 to 1975. Known as the Blind Dead Quartet, the
films feature the reanimated skeletal remains of the Knights Templar,
keepers of the secrets of eternal life and now unstoppable killing
machines on undead horses and clad in their Templar garb. Their skull
features blazing empty eye sockets require them to find their victims
entirely by sound...the trick is to not scream their lungs out at
their ghastly appearance!

Tonight's film
Return Of The Evil Dead is the second in the Quartet, following on
the bony heels of Tombs Of The Blind Dead (1971), while completely
reinventing its Templar back story, as the whimsical de Ossorio did
with each entry. This time the blood-drinking, human sacrificing
Templars are holed up in an Abbey in the Spanish town of Berzanzo,
their eyes burnt out by angry villagers and set on fire – but not
before a curse falls upon their descendants. Five hundred years later
and the townsfolk of Berzanzo are happily celebrating the anniversary
of scouring the Templar devils from the face of the Earth. Night
falls, dry ice oozes from the ruined Abbey, and skeletal hands
covered in rotting cowls slowly emerge from their tombs...

Back in Berzanzo,
it's certainly no Fourth of July Picnic. The town's corrupt Mayor is
busy ordering his goons to beat up Jack Marlowe, the American
fireworks technician and ex-lover of local sexpot Vivian, whom the
Mayor and at least one of his goons have their greasy eyes on. As the
Templar's mummified army reaches the town square and hacks its way
through the festivities, the core survivors seek sanctuary in a
church, and then turn on each other one by one. It's like Hitchcock's
Lifeboat (1944) – the tight confines bringing out the characters'
latent jealousy, greed, selfishness and inhumanity – if zombies
were clutching at the side of the raft. Particularly repellent is the
Mayor, who thinks nothing of using his constituents as Templar bait.
Vindication is the Templars, and the world finds itself a few
assholes fewer.

As a film, Return Of
The Evil Dead is much more suspenseful than a skeleton army in
sackcloth should engender. The very appearance of the undead Templars
and their modus operandi (blind but not deaf, my sweet pointed
coccyx!) require a very serious leap of faith on the part of its
audience, and yet, with those iconic soiled hoods and grinning
skulls, they can't help but disturb. De Ossorio recycles many of the
first Blind Dead's aural and visual tricks, such as the jarring
slow-motion shots of the Templars on zombie horseback reinforcing
their otherworldliness, and the soundtrack dripping with low moans
and pitch-shifted bells. The set pieces are nothing short of
fantastic: the village square massacre, the fate of hunchbacked
cripple Murdo, and in an obvious nod to another Hitchcock film The
Birds (1963), the young girl's heartstopping walk through the zombie
sentinels (ALWAYS remember that in the case of an undead Armageddon,
children are the weakest link). There are moments of intentional
humour – the scenes with the governor and his saucy maid are nicely
handled – but overall the tone is grim to the point of apocalyptic,
and like other Spanish horrors of the early Seventies, equal parts
gothic atmosphere and modern gore-soaked shock tactics.

“You have to be
quiet!” yells one character, and I hope you do the same. Sit very
still, and don't utter a sound until the end of Return Of The Evil
Dead.

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HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.